Two Forms of Education

David Brooks of the New York Times has a real knack for framing issues in a simple, cogent and effective way. In his column on January 27, he quoted a report from a Harvard committee charged with coming up with, as it were, a mission statement about the purpose of a liberal education. Brooks took that statement and contrasted it with a conservative perspective that he gleaned from ON THINKING INSTITUTIONALLY by a political scientist named Hugh Heclo.
The Harvard document stated that the aim of a liberal education was “to be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements,” and to promote “the individualism of modern culture.” The idea was to shake up the belief system or the values of the student coming to Harvard, “to disorient young people and help them find ways to reorient themselves.” The key was to assist them in “breaking away” and “to think for themselves.” In sum, a person with a liberal education should question the status quo, not make it sacrosanct, and he should be prepared to pursue a “personal identity.”
As for the conservative mission statement in regard education, Brooks puts it this way: “We are defined by what life asks of me (and) the rules and obligations that tell us what we are supposed to do.” We live and learn by traveling through institutions (family, school, church, profession or craft), all of which bear the stamp of Tradition, which contains the values created and agreed upon a long time ago, values validated as worthy life guidelines and stellar examples to emulate. The new generations give these institutions respect, gravity, and credibility. The idea is affirmation, not to question their worth or reality. Moreover, the person will live with a sense of debt to Tradition, with a sense of owing something to this support system and its abiding ‘truth.’ The institutions constitute a “delivery system” and a “covenant” that supplies “psychic profits.” (”Ask not what your country can do for you, but what can you do for your country.”)
I went to college bred in the context of family, church, Catholic schools, and working class values. When it came time to select a college to go to I was torn between Notre Dame and the University of Wisconsin. It was my art teacher who wanted me to go to Notre Dame. She was a Dominican nun who had a MA in sculpture from the school. She kept telling me, “If you go to Madison, your faith will be tested.” I chose Wisconsin and she was right, I lost my faith, and I was glad I did, as it liberated me to seek my own identity. How did it happen? I met a great variety of people with different perspectives and values, including my first atheist and communist. I listened to a lot of critical minded professors that I found persuasive and insightful. I had sex for the first time. (Catholicism had held me back.) After reading “Nature” and Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, I began to think of spirituality in non-institutional ways. By my junior year at UW, I stopped going to church. And I never looked back.
At age twenty one I saw my goal in life as Individuation, a search for personal identity. Institutional molds struck me then and now as external garments, something tried and true that has social sanction, a ready-made face in the crowd. I chose to ‘carve my own mask’ and to do it by internal guidelines. For example, here are two dreams I had while finding a new life in California. In one I saw a circus strongman breaking chains wrapped around his chest, something akin to Anthony Quinn in “La Strada.” There could hardly be a more telling and vivid image for the liberation I felt. A few weeks later I dreamt of a fallen cathedral; it looked like it had been bombed, it was so full of stony debris. It was darkest night and the only part of the structure still standing was the nave with a magnificent Rose Window glowing like a multicolored jewel in the cosmic night. I worked to clear the debris and piled the stones up outside the foundation which was still intact. Clearly, my intentions were to reconstruct the church, but by my own lights, such as they were.
Life is a circle of choices. Many will chose the institutional path, but I chose the search for personal identity, to be the architect of the inner man. And I thank the education that provided me with an opportunity I am not sure I would have had without it.